Yet another Killer Virus

Rating: 9/10 (5 October 2008)

There are some themes, like the end of the world, that works of the imagination keep returning to over and over again. Rod Taylor in the 1959 classic film "The Time Machine" sees the human race destroying itself in a nuclear war only to reemerge with subterranean carnivorous morlocks farming a race of dumb blondes as a source of food while they greenly lurk underground. Charlton Heston in "The Omega Man" hides out in a heavily fortified compound, cruising the empty streets of the heavily fortified city while crazed, light-averse survivors of a plague wait until dark to pounce and destroy. Stephen King's film adaptation of his book "The Stand" shows us a world decimated by a killer influenza which has the survivors ending up in Las Vegas. And Michael Crichton has the demon agent coming from outer space in "The Andromeda Strain" and doing bad things to rubber and turning human blood to red dust. And now once again in the UK this time, "28 Days After" those generally untrustworthy scientists in secret labs are playing deadly games with germ warfare agents only to be unwittingly set free by animal rights guerillas. Having seen so many of these films before, I think "28 Days Later" does an excellent job of conveying the weird and horrible world of survivors of a holocaust.
As a microbiologist I am in a somewhat better than average position to judge the scientific merits of such events. Certainly viruses and plagues have decimated populations in the past, from the Black Plagues of the middle ages, to the 1918 influenza pandemic, and the AIDS pandemic of today. The Ebola outbreaks of central Africa are perhaps the most mysterious and horrifying in recent memory, and in this era of worldwide air travel or of natural migrations of infected birds, it isn't far from reality. It is a good thing that public health officials maintain a certain vigilance.
What sets "28 Days Later" apart is its "realism" (while of course being quite a work of imagination) however the virus is not the only heavy of the piece. While I could have told them not to take the tunnel, and would have probably put the car in reverse at the sight of all the wrecked cars underneath, and tried a bridge, and while I wonder at the tendency of contagion to turn normal people into murdering zombies who like rabid dogs attack and infect others, the curious turns of the plot where the characters make their way through a post-apocalyptic world where not all the villains are "the infecteds" made it a truly effective film in the horror genre. It was an excellent film.